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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Who won the recent elections in India….

Certainly not the 51.75% of the population who didn’t vote for the coalition that will now be forming the government at the centre. The short-sellers anticipating a hung assembly were not the winners for sure. The organizers of the biggest event Neither did the exit poll companies who maintained their consistency in incorrectly predicting outcomes; though I have a feeling that they do this intentionally to benefit from stock market bets. The telecom companies also did not win as the election committee is yet to follow the Indian Idol model to let people vote for their preferred candidate over phone. The higher educated middle class Indians, the ones who hate poor immigrants, the ones who silently hope for people from other religions to be killed, the ones forming community clubs in local neighborhoods, the ones who believe that lower caste people deserve their fate, those who demand third-party sacrifice for the sake of their dumb and extreme patriotism, the lot that hides their extreme conservatism behind their laptop screen viewing eyes; they didn’t win either. And the Left, not only did they not win, they lost the most, in a world which is decidedly turning leftwards (USA, South Africa, France, El Salvador…). These self styled ideological purists who withdrew support from the previous government under the unintelligible pretext that it was getting closer to imperialist USA while participating in the paradox of an utterly bourgeois democracy of India, didn’t even see it coming.

So who won? It was claimed to be a victory for the poor as it had stunned the “India shining” party of traders and their parasitic priests. But the rich knew it was their victory as the winning party was super effective in promoting their cause by paying lip service to issues such as land reforms. It was claimed to be a victory for the Muslims as the party supposed to hate them had lost. But most Hindus knew that the winning party will never stop them from carrying out another pogrom of the Muslims just like the good old days. In short, it was a victory for status quo without the explicit veil of ideology. After all, isn’t human history too short to empirically prove the superiority of any ideology?